Galerie Fanny Guillon-Laffaile

Time in Michel Séméniako’s black and white photographs measures itself not in 60ths of a second but in millennia. “Les Dieux de la Nuit” (The gods of the night), who have lent their name to this exhibition, inhabit the sacred trees of Senegal, the prehistoric menhirs of Brittany, the cliffs of Normandy, the amphitheaters of Naples, the palaces of China, the temples of India. For more than a decade, Séméniako has been seeking out those deities with a large-format camera and an assortment of flashlights. The technique, he points out, could not be more “antitechnological”: he poses the camera on its tripod, opens the shutter, and for a period of 15 or 30 minutes or even longer, he literally (and figuratively) illuminates the elements that he wants to capture on film. As was the case with 19th-century vintage travel photos, the large-format camera guarantees an exacting realism, down to the